• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• Rotter’s locus of control is measured by the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale.

• Maslow’s self-actualization is measured by the Personal Orientation Inventory.

• Rogers’s congruence between the actual self and ideal self is measured by the Q-sort.

• MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2)—567 true-false items.

• Patterns of responses reveal personality dimensions.

• NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) and the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ)—assess personality based on the five-factor model in healthy people; used in cross-cultural research.

Self-concept and Self-esteem:

Self-concept—our overall view of our abilities, behavior, and personality.

Self-esteem—one part of our self-concept or how we evaluate ourselves.

CHAPTER 15

Testing and Individual Differences

IN THIS CHAPTER

Summary: Are you taking the AP Psychology exam in May? Have you taken the SAT or ACT? These are all standardized tests. You’ve already taken lots of tests in your lifetime, and will likely take many more, but all tests are not created equal. Some tests are better than others at predicting or evaluating your potential, or measuring your achievement. Tests are so important to you because they are used to make decisions that affect your life

This chapter focuses on test quality and qualities of tests, ethics in testing, intelligence and intelligence testing, and the interactions of heredity and environment on intelligence.

Key Ideas

Standardization and Norms

Reliability and Validity

Types of tests

Ethics and standards in testing

Intelligence

Intelligence testing

Kinds of intelligence

Heredity/environment and intelligence

Human diversity

Standardization and Norms

Psychometrics is the measurement of mental traits, abilities, and processes. Psychometricians are involved in test development in order to measure some construct or behavior that distinguishes among people. Constructs are ideas that help summarize a group of related phenomena or objects; they are hypothetical abstractions related to behavior and defined by groups of objects or events. For example, we can’t measure happiness, honesty, or intelligence in feet or meters. If someone tells the truth in a wide variety of situations, however, we might consider that person honest. Although we cannot observe happiness, honesty, or intelligence directly, they are useful concepts for understanding, describing, and predicting behavior. Psychological tests include tests of abilities, interests, creativity, personality, and intelligence. A good test is standardized, reliable, and valid. After many questions for a test have been written, edited, and pretested, questions are thrown out if nearly everyone answers them correctly or if very few answer them right because these types of questions do not tell us anything about individual differences. Tests that differentiate among test takers and that are composed of questions that fairly test all aspects of the behavior to be assessed are assembled. They are then administered to a sample of hundreds or thousands of people who fairly represent all of the people who are likely to take the test. This sample is used to standardize the test. Standardization is a two-part test development procedure that first establishes test norms from the test results of the large representative sample who initially took the test, then assures that the test is both administered and scored uniformly for all test takers. Norms are scores established from the test results of the representative sample, which are then used as a standard for assessing the performances of subsequent test takers; more simply, norms are standards used to compare scores of test takers. For example, the mean score for the SAT is 500 and the standard deviation is 100, whereas the mean score for the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (IQ test) is 100 and the standard deviation is 15, based on the “standardization” sample. When administering a standardized test, all proctors must give the same directions and time limits and provide the same